The Grammar Police

This is the grammar police. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be held against you in a court of grammatical law.

Grammar Police is an instance of the X policesnowclonelet (which I haven’t posted on before), and a very popular one at that. But if you look at some of the enormous number of sites using the expression, you’ll see that most of them aren’t about what linguists think of as grammar, but about what I’ve calledgarmmra (largely spelling and punctuation).

A related snowclonelet is “X jail”, e.g. “grammar jail”. In theory, “grammar jail” refers to a jail for people who violate rules of grammar; semantically, it’s like “traffic court” rather than “divorce court”, “small-claims court” or “kangaroo court”.

[…] Keeping up the paranoid sense of threat in the world of grammar, style, and usage, and combining errorism as a play on terrorism with the snowclonelet composite X police, in this case the very common grammar police (most recent posting here). […]